Writer

Dylan R. Matthews

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What worries me is that I think Harvard students have convinced ourselves that we have such a theory, one that exculpates us from sacrifice while leaving us convinced that we are doing the right thing. We call it “meritocracy.”

Not a lot about politics is fair, but one thing that is, is that in well-functioning democracies like France (or really any country with a less rigid system than the United States’), policies that succeed in producing widely shared prosperity are rewarded at the ballot box.

So we’re left with a Democratic president whose domestic agenda is less ambitious than that of a Republican president from three decades ago and a Republican opposition that decries that same agenda as rank socialism.

Taking a job at Goldman Sachs is immoral. To take a job in finance is to become complicit in a socially useless enterprise that ruins lives. You should feel bad about yourself if you do it. You will be a worse person if you do it.